Ignore for a minute the disingenuous nature of those people who opposed the war in Afghanistan and now criticize "outsourcing" that war and those who opposed war in Iraq but now say we don't have enough troops over there and want two new divisions of soldiers created. Ignore those who criticize Bush for acting unilaterally and say he hasn't engaged our "real" allies - even though they are now criticizing him for not unilaterally engaging North Korea and Iran. Think about this - "dumb old" George Bush has taken the nuanced approach of dealing with each of the 3 members of the axis of evil in the way most commensurate with the threat they present in relation to the resources available.

Iraq was lead by someone who had thumbed his nose at the world community and its sanctions for years and was bribing most of the world to look the other way from his genocidal and terrorist sponsoring tendencies. President Bush knew that the only country that could do anything about it was the US, and he did something. On the issue of North Korea, Bush knows that China is probably the only country in the world with any real influence, so he forced multilateral discussions on North Korea. He also knows that insular and far away North Korea poses the least direct threat to the US. As for Iran, Bush has humored the EU, allowing them to attempt (futilely) to broker a deal on developing nuclear capability. That attempt is not working, and is showing how impotent the EU and United Nations are in dealing with these kinds of threats.

Now Bush is being criticized by the Monday morning generals for having engaged Iraq and leaving us no with no capacity to deal with Iran. Aha! This proves to the gloom and doomers that Bush miscalculated! Not so fast. This misses something obvious - Bush knows that we have a trump card in one of our real allies, an ally with some big brass ones, an ally that will never let Iran have nukes, an ally that has been kept on the sidelines until the right time. Israel knows when the right time is.